The book, “What has gone wrong with Mitigation?“, which has just been released, is a collection of 24 analyses I’ve written since 2018 on international decision-making and wrangling around climate change. About two-thirds of these analyses were also published by the Dutch sustainability website Duurzaamnieuws, some in rudimentary form, and all the articles appeared in English and French and were widely distributed in those languages. It was actually through a casual suggestion from Peter van Vliet (editor-in-chief of Duurzaamnieuws) that I turned it into a book. To build a bridge.
Because, in my opinion
- on the one hand it marks the end of a period in which we have, in a rather stupid manner squandered the opportunity to avert potentially catastrophic climate change;
- and on the other hand ties in with a recent trend in climate discussions (quarrels) in which the proponents (prop’s) and opponents (opp’s) are starting to notice the real hot potato of the climate problem that we have been unable to swallow for 33 years now (i.e., since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992) and thus did dodge with combined forces. .
Let me go back to the beginning to clarify that last trend (i.e., mental awakening).
Initially
Climate change tiptoed into the public consciousness as a topic of concern about 30 years ago only very gradually. Initially, it was mainly specialist scientists and politicians who were concerned with it. They immediately recognized it as something significant, but it was only after Al Gore’s powerful imagery that this multi-headed monster became visible to ordinary people, resulting in continuous media attention.
Then, slowly, you see positions of stalemate emerging between population groups and parties. To approximately 25% of the population, it was immediately complete nonsense because it was unimaginable. However, around 75% became increasingly impressed, and through their attention and choices, scientifically based public policies were established that, stumbling over ever-greater oppositions, were unable to load the relentless direction and punch that would have been necessary to fell the climate bear before it grew out of its gentle and distant sockets.
Why not? The more clearly the multifaceted economic consequences of global warming began to be covered in the media, the more divided people became. It turned into a cacophony of accusations, grievances, and false leads. People jumped from insulation and heating as culprits to traffic and aviation, then to meat, and finally, via China and mining, to the major oil companies. By moving along hat list every year, many a decisive sub-plan ended up in the bottom drawer of the desk. We didn’t choose, we scrapped and backtracked on policies when implementations fell short or met with too much resistance. Election after election, we juggled the climate emergency out of sight by letting disputes over purchasing power, migration, housing, social issues, and security prevail. And while we, swimming in ever-wider seas of opportunities, bought a slightly larger car, modernized the kitchen, communicated more intensively with screens, took vacations one after the other and loaded our plates with cheap Argentine steaks, we sought comfort in the amazing growth figures of renewables, the ambitious EU ETS emissions plan, and the inflated positive tone of the annual decarbonization report. Oh dear, we were actually doing quite well.
But what were we avoiding in the meantime, passing the buck from pillar to post? What exactly smothered our courage and determination to push through?
The core
I will let a few recent participants in the global climate debate have their say to reveal this. First, two prop’s.
Pierre Charbonnier, author of La Coalition Climat, states in a recent interview (see what he says between 1h27 and 1h32): “What nobody is talking about is that if you want to downsize carbon-rich branches and scale up carbon-free branches, you have to budget for it, plan it, supervise it, and actually do it entirely together by giving each other perspective and, above all, providing those in the declining sectors with retraining and guidance in new replacement jobs in growing sectors, otherwise it will never work”.
Charbonnier then points out that you need a very strong social backbone to implement such strict steering. And this is precisely what Méda, a sociologist (president of the Veblen Institute) who has studied for decades the issues surrounding ecological transition, highlights in her reflection on ‘a realistic restrictive scenario’: “It requires radically coordinated policies, that we stop thinking in boxes, it requires ecological planning. What we need is a general secretariat for ecological planning. We need to plan 20 years from now what new jobs we are going to create. How are we going to re-skill people? ….A lot of anticipation is needed, and we also need to consult with the regions and with the social partners. We need to get everyone back around the table. That’s why I say it’s an absolutely gigantic project. Our whole society has to be redesigned”.
Jonathan Watts‘ contribution to this discussion then lays bare the raw nerve of the opp’s. To understand the current resistance to climate policy, he uses the metaphor that trees in the Amazon region respond to stress and drought by “.. to shut down their periphery. They shed leaves so that any remaining moisture can be cycled inside the trunk and branches. Recent history, however, suggests that the first instinct of many individuals is to also shut down their periphery – ‘close the borders’, ‘build walls’, ‘impose tariffs’, ‘stop the boats’ – in an attempt to conserve jobs, food and money for themselves“.
This is not particularly unusual, as every system exhibits ‘lockdown behavior’ in crisis situations. But then he identifies the coalfire underneath (underground): “The great fear of Trump and his billionaire backers in the petrochemical and infotech industries appears to be that humanity could come together to find a solution to shared problems. For them, this would mean regulation, stagnation and higher taxes on the rich”.
And this is entirely consistent with Trump’s own contribution to identifying the red-hot core of the climate issue that we have been avoiding like hell for 33 years, by not clearly naming it, nor disputing it among ourselves, and thus not implementing it. In his UN speech (September 2025), the king of the climate opp’s exposes himself in one sentence: “This hoax destroys freedom”. That is exactly right: Planning means making agreements and letting everyone walk between the lines. Trump is 100% right. The end of freedom.
There you have it: The aversion to external regulation of all important aspects of our lives simultaneously is the red-hot core that has driven us to search, like possessed ants, for those climate change mitigating remedies that would allow our way of life to continue to expand in terms of energy supply, and would be achievable in our current social system of weakly interfering governments that somewhat demarcate the decision-making scope of members of society but mostly leave it to those who, whether organized or not (in banks, companies, foundations, funds), have freely allocable resources at their disposal and thus exercise the bulk of the steering.
So was this abhorrence just nonsense that could have been brushed aside? No, definitely not. In the long term, it is impossible for a person to remain human if he or she does not have considerable room for maneuver in dealing with a challenging environment. Operating within a rigid straitjacket of command ultimately kills our developmental capacity and our value creation. However, it is nonsense from Trump, Musk, and numerous other extremely wealthy CEOs to suggest that higher taxes would restrict their freedoms. After all, they’re drowning in money and positions of power anyway. Their freedom is not affected by paying a few percent tax per year. In other words, they use the deprivation of freedom argument (because of climate policies) purely (says Watts) to stir up fear, hostility, and support for strong leaders.
The fight
Are we going to get stuck on this aversion? I don’t think so. The prop’s are starting to realize that an absurdly heavy collective steering force will have to be established, and the opp’s that they will have to give up a huge chunk of their current steering force. That’s where the fight lies. Admittedly, it is already taking on grim forms in some places: In some countries, prop’s are already being removed from their work (i.e., climate research) and even being persecuted. But no matter how that struggle plays out, ultimately, if extremely serious climate disruptions start endangering the survival of entire populations, we will end up in the middle of a very tight collective steering system consisting of the distribution and rationing of essentials, and also tightly regulating the production of those essentials.
Is this inevitable for centuries to come? It doesn’t have to be. It is not impossible that, precisely because of the extreme climate change we’re about to experience, people will adjust their ambitions to such an extent that they can continue to live under a more livable governance regime. I mean?
In the current debate, the core of our collective powerlessness is becoming increasingly clear. As mentioned: The point of contention revolves around the degree of regulation.
But beware: the contrast between the parties is now being blown up by both sides into Free Society ⇌ Authoritarianism, and that is a fallacy. Why?
Both parties are exaggerating in their assessment of the regulatory burden because they each want to keep all consumption balls in the air. Yes, if you want to continue with optimally innovative long-chain production processes that run on global inputs and sell their products worldwide (see also the recent proposal of Stern), then pursuing zero emissions means that you have to set up a totally authoritarian government apparatus, also at the international level, for centuries to come. Both the prop’s (including many degrowth advocates) and the opp’s are trapped in that paradigm. Even Watts, who with his ‘interdependence’ concept indicates that for him the ongoing innovative globally interacting development of humanity is obviously sacred. He fails to understand that in such a vision of the future, the cohesion needed to form the strong social backbone required to overcome this paralysis (i.e., the fear of being regulated within narrow limits) can never emerge.
Precisely in order to break out of this governance impasse (and achieve greater convergence in terms of values between citizens), I have consistently proposed a much deeper approach to the transition, namely making all processes much more autonomous and local (short chains) so that your control problem becomes much less complex and compulsive at the local level. Decouple, divide, and rule, so to speak. See chapter 9.3 in Solid societal solutions to stop climate change, where I argue that we can only control global warming if we switch to a decentralized, low-tech structure of national economies and a massive downscaling of the interactions (flows) between those national economies. In that form, national and international governance problems become so minimal that their strictness and rigidity (for centuries) become feasible, achievable, and livable for people.
How deep?
From that perspective, the fact that the recent climate debate is moving closer to the red-hot core (i.e., that prop’s and opp’s are more openly clashing on the issue of regulation) is only a good thing. Because that quarrel will awaken forces (I mean universities, see MIT’s recent reaction, and the youth in general, see also the Gen Z uprisings) that will so fiercely inflame the battle between prop’s and opp’s — in a setting of increasing climate disruption and imminent danger — that the prop’s might finally realize through these confrontations that what they currently want in order to attain net-zero, namely Green Growth, is completely unfeasible, both technically and in terms of the national and international steering required to achieve it. That it’s rooted in wishful thinking, namely arising from the moral pressure (sense of duty) to deliver humanity with ever more convenience and prosperity.
Hence, the prop’s should begin to understand that we can only transition to net-zero in a timely manner by implementing a few significant interventions in our current economic exchange system, namely (a) dismantling the power of free capital much more thoroughly than is currently being proposed with a few ridiculous billionaire taxes here and there, (b) removing a bunch of strictly unnessary consumption balls from the air, and (c) localizing the remaining essential production processes, organizing them more autonomously (see, for example, the recent EU steel plan), and standardizing them intensively. Such globally decoupled local production, freed from wild west investors, would then, as mentioned, simplify the required local and international governance in such a way that strictness and livability can go hand in hand and be maintained on that basis. This would also provide a better response (than authoritarianism) to the regulatory fears of the opp’s.
The book
In “What has gone wrong with Mitigation?”, the above-mentioned issues regarding evolving stances towards external regulation are constantly revisited in concrete situations, approached from different angles, and rephrased in different ways. It was a learning process for me, too, of course, to get to the heart of the matter.
The book is expressly only available in print. All internet links have been converted to explanations in footnotes and references to literature. As such, it offers a carefully composed snapshot of all the insights, viewpoints, and proposals that have been put forward over the past 10 years in discussions on climate change from an ever-widening range of perspectives.
It is intended for those who will survive global warming, and in my opinion will be very different from those who currently want to overcome it. The latter, caught up in the game of innovative expansion in order to stay ahead of the rest, will at some point reach a dead end.
Time will tell how wrong the current mitigation gamble will work out.
J. B. Nijssen
